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diversified in the early 1900s. Before Christie’s Rosebery sale, Sotheby’s had handled an art-and-furniture sale for the Rosebery clan, and the poaching of this client awoke Christie’s rival to the fact that, though the sums of money involved were relatively small, a wine department gave an auction house an edge in attracting new business and fully servicing existing clients. The Glamis sale, in 1970, stirred Sotheby’s to action. Glamis Castle was owned by the Bowes-Lyon family, one of whom sat on Sotheby’s board. That year, Sotheby’s launched its own wine department.
    Michael Broadbent’s life was awash in wine, but it wasn’t all raised-pinky soirées. Auctioneering can be at once among the most patrician occupations and among the least glamorous. Even eminent gavel-bangers may double as glorified stockboys, cataloging and packing up the contents of moldy, spider-ridden basements and attics. And Broadbent’s wife, Daphne, and their two children were often by his side. Easter holidays meant trips to the wine country. Weekends might be spent on hands and knees in damp, grubby, medieval cellars in France, Hungary, and elsewhere, dodging white salamanders that had never seen the sun, while assembling cardboard boxes and filling them with bottles as soon as Broadbent had cataloged them.
    He was a man of habits, most of which involved drinking or work related to it. Every Sunday morning Broadbent could be found in bed, writing his monthly column for
Decanter,
an English wine magazine. Mealtime conversation was wine talk. Starting at age seven, the children were served wine with dinner (only on special occasions were they allowed the option of drinking orange juice or Coke instead). Emma found it a bore, and, after giving the wine business a short try, became a lawyer and later a judge. Bartholomew cottoned to it more; at fifteen, at Château Latour, he drank an 1865 that was a revelation. Michael Broadbent was a staunch observer of that archaic British midmorning pick-me-up known as elevenses; every day he could be found, before noon, enjoying a glass of dry Madeira, German white wine, or Champagne. At 2:45 p.m., he would take a twenty-minute nap. Toward evening he would have a glass of Champagne or Tio Pepe sherry, several glasses of claret, and perhaps a vintage Port. If the regimen sounded like that of a lush, the truth was that Broadbent practiced moderation. He drank often, but he sipped, and he was an evangelist of wine’s preservative properties. His frenetic cycling didn’t hurt, either.
    As a result of his meticulous record-keeping, he could tell you that he had tasted more than 40,000 wines as of the mid-1980s. That was more wines than most people had ever consumed, and more old wines than anyone alive. He could tell you the best wine he ever drank (an 1870 Lafite in magnum), the wine he would want if he were marooned on a desert island (a Terrantez 1862 Madeira by HM Borges), the oldest wine he’d ever drunk (a 1653 German hock), and his favorite producer (Lafite). It wasn’t just Lafite’s wines that put Broadbent in mind of the fairer sex; he felt that the vineyard site itself had “almost an erotic shape.”
    First-growth claret, from vineyards on Bordeaux’s left bank, was at the center of Broadbent’s auctions, but since the 1855 Classification the stodgy Bordeaux aristocracy had grudgingly acknowledged the parity, in reputation and price if not official status, of a handful of other wines. Cheval Blanc, made in the medieval town of St. Emilion, across the Dordogne River from Bordeaux, and unusual for being produced mainly from the cabernet franc grape, ascended to the first tier via two legendary vintages, 1921 and 1947. Also on the right bank, Pétrus, a merlot-based wine from Pomerol traditionally favored by the Belgians, won the attention of the powerful English market with its 1947 vintage. And Mouton-Rothschild gained actual premier status in 1973 when, by dint of assiduous lobbying,